oihfedfhorigiojisdeffandomcom-20200214-history
Reogonrog
First let me state unequivocally that both Peter and Elon are very remarkable, visionary individuals. Peter's contributions to PayPal are well known and Elon's are outlined comprehensively in other answers here. My context for this answer and full disclosures provided below. But as to the question of who is the more central "leader" figure of the PayPal mafia, it's really Peter for several reasons: 1) More of the PayPal mafia was tied to Peter --> More folks in this group, especially high profile ones like Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, Keith Rabois, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, Luke Nosek, et al were all part of the PayPal/Confinity half that Peter/Max founded of the merged company that was PayPal. Of the high profile founders, relatively few (e.g. Jeremy Stoppelman) were part of the X.com half of the company Elon founded. This proportion was probably true even if you look at less high profile folks. A decent chunk of the early X.com people stuck around at eBay post acquisition rather than starting new companies. Also while Elon was the CEO of the combined PayPal initially, Peter took over in the fall of 2000 so he was around the combined company much longer than Elon in a day-to-day leadership role. Elon was Chairman after Peter took over as CEO, but Elon's involvement from late 2000 onwards was as a board member and so those of us who were employees and execs at PayPal had far less exposure to him. 2) Elon moved to LA --> Around the time the eBay transaction was announced, Elon moved to LA. He began working on SpaceX there because there was a greater pool of knowledge around aerospace there than Silicon Valley and also I believe Elon and his wife at the time (he divorced and re-married) personally wanted to live in southern California. This meant that during the formative years from late 2002 through 2007-8, when many early folks at PayPal left to start working on new projects Elon was a little disconnected physically from this group than Peter who remained in the SF bay area. 3) Peter got involved in far more projects started by PayPal mafia --> This is probably a result primarily of #1 and #2, but probably also some differences in personality and Peter's and Elon's respective goals/ambitions. But Peter certainly got more involved in providing advice or investment in literally dozens and dozens of projects that involved PayPal mafia folks. Elon didn't get involved in nearly as many. For the sake of context and full disclosure... I was an early PayPal employee, I was there a couple years before the IPO and then sale to eBay. Elon was actually the one who hired me, I accepted a job with X.com in Dec 1999 while I was finishing up college and then started full-time in May 2000 just after the Confinity/X.com merger closed. But I got to work with both Elon and Peter during my time there. I left in late 2002 as part of the founding team of LinkedIn with Reid Hoffman, which Peter was an angel investor in -- Elon's had many personal successes (as has Peter), but Peter had deeper ties to PayPal (and the subsequent "mafia") in a couple of ways. First, Peter co-founded the business with the name PayPal, and Elon did not. Elon founded x.com, while Peter and Max Levchin founded PayPal. The two merged, and while the business was initially called x.com, it ultimately was renamed PayPal and looked far more like the original PayPal product. If the business had continued to call itself x.com, it might be a different story. Second, Peter was at PayPal for a lot longer than Elon. I joined PayPal in December 2000, over a year pre-IPO and almost two years pre-acquisition. When I joined, Peter was CEO; he'd remain in that position until the company's acquisition by Ebay was finalized in late 2002. He was the obvious leader of the company at that period, including during our two crowning moments: IPO and acquisition. By contrast, Elon left the company a few months before I joined, and I've never even met him. Of course, any term as simple and media-friendly as "PayPal Mafia" is going to be a shortcut for the truth. Still, I'd be hard-pressed to think of many of my PayPal colleagues who express closer ties to Elon Musk than to Peter Thiel